• Exhibition
• CV

WALKING ON WOLVES

The forest floor strewn with eyes. — Susan Sontag

Walking on Wolves is composed of photographic enlargements of 1,328 sequential film frames, representing just under one minute of running time. The frames—each of which has been printed individually—are scattered across the entire floor of the gallery in clusters of shots. The sequence is extracted from Furtivos (Poachers), 1975, and spans one of the most savage and hauntingly beautiful scenes in the history of Spanish cinema. Against the backdrop of a lush autumn forest, the camera tracks a folkloric old hag tending her animal traps; the scene reaches its climax in her brutal attack on an injured she-wolf she finds caught in one of them.

It was almost as though Furtivos had forecast the death of Franco. — Peter Besas

Furtivos was released at the apex of the cultural permissiveness that had been building in the drawn¬-out months leading toward Franco’s death, in the fall of 1975. Directed by José Luis Borau and co-written by Borau and Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, the story was conceived as an allegory that would test the limits of official censorship. The film embodies the last throes of Franco’s brutal legacy through its depiction of incest and cruelty in its peasant characters. Borau’s choice of the forest as the backdrop for his story challenged Franco’s myth of Spain as a “peaceful forest” and undermined the Caudillo’s use of hunting expeditions as propaganda in an attempt to create the illusion of his continuing prowess in the face of rumors of his failing health.

The wolf, wolves, are intensities, speeds, temperatures, nondecomposable variable distances. A swarming, a wolfing. - Deleuze and Guattari

The scene extracted for Walking on Wolves functions as a vortex within the larger allegory of the film, drawing its depiction of cruelty into a fairy-tale arena where the demonization of the old crone, Martina, escalates against the isolated beauty of the forest. Martina and the wolf become interchangeable predators in the unchecked circulation of violence. The brutality of nature and culture can no longer be sorted out. The cloistered world of Franco’s Spain has completely turned in on itself.

A fabulous multiplicity movie swarming everywhere. — Jack Kerouac

Walking on Wolves pulls the eye of the viewer to the ground and puts his or her feet in direct physical confrontation with the images. Time, shifting perspectives, and chance encounters function as perceptual triggers that continually redirect the gaze downward. The scattered stills of clustered frames destabilize any given progression either through the space of the film or the space of the gallery. Arrested from their sequential advance, the frames are remobilized in the precarious routes of the spectator’s walk. The surface of the images, already marked with the dust and scratches of the original footage, are subjected to further scarring with the dirt, scuffs, and tears inflicted by the soles of shoes passing over them, so that the traces of the viewers’ meanderings create the final layer of ruin.

Some sagebrush here, a little cactus there, trail and hoof beats going nowhere. — Robert Smithson

In scattering the stills in random clusters across the gallery’s floor, the linear narrative of the scene is all but lost. Images of Martina and the wolf are shattered into displaced fragments subsumed into the overall effect of ruin. The stills’ arbitrary and overlapping placement, layered materiality, and autumn hues simulate the forest floor depicted in Borau’s scene, evoking the detritus of organic matter under various stages of decomposition.

FURTIVOS

Cruelty is the most extreme in nature, and especially among the poor. The poor are not happy, beautiful and peaceful. Their poverty forces them to become cruel . . . I wanted to show that the peaceful woods hid killing and cruelty. The Spanish title Furtivos has two meanings—illegal hunters or poachers, and also those who live their lives in a secretive way. Both meanings apply here — I wanted to show that under Franco, Spain was living a secretive life. Virtually everyone in this film is a furtivo. — José Luis Borau

The story of Furtivos revolves around the incestuous relationship between a young man, Angel, and his mother, Martina, who live together in a farmhouse deep in a lush forest in a northern province of Spain. Angel, who pieces together a living by poaching game, offers the expertise of his hunting skills to the civil governor of the province, who visits the forest from time to time to test his own meager skills at hunting and to sample the cooking of Martina, who had been his wet nurse. One day during a trip to the provincial capital to buy trapping supplies, Angel picks up Milagros, a fifteen-year-old runaway from boarding school, and lingers with her in the city. Martina’s anxiety about his prolonged absence builds as she moves through the forest, carefully camouflaging her illegal traps from the governor, who has arrived wIth a small entourage of officials to hunt game. Eventually she discovers a she-wolf caught in a one of her traps and proceeds to hack it to nearly death with a hoe before dragging it back home, where she leaves it chained in the cellar to suffer. At that exact moment, Angel arrives back home with Milagros. In the next scene, the most scandalous in the film, Martina’s displacement is made violently explicit as Angel literally drags his mother out of the bed they share so that he can sleep there with Milagros. In a rage Martina returns to the cellar to finish off the wolf. This brutal substitute killing is a prelude to the actual murder of Milagros by Martina and sets up the chain of violence that reaches its inevitable limit when Angel takes his own revenge by shooting his mother in the back, in the forest freshly covered with snow.

My mother and I are in a room. In one corner the entire wall is covered with holy pictures. My mother takes the pictures down and throws them on the floor. The pictures fall and break into pieces. I am astonished that my pious mother should do such a thing. — Freud’s Wolf Man

Furtivos is iconic in its depiction of the traditional Spanish themes of incest and matricide. In the Spanish version of the Oedipal tale, the patricidal urge is often displaced toward the mother to protect patriarchal authority. These transgressive themes are driven by a national history immersed in the iconography of the Counter-Reformation and its fetishization of the blood of Christ, on the one hand, as well as the “Black Legend” on the other, in which the Inquisition is given as evidence in the demonization of the Spanish character as backward, cruel, humorless, violent, and prone to political tyranny.

In the loneliness of the forests, the peasants become crazy. — Antonio Machado

In interviews Borau has recounted that the source for Furtivos was Goya’s Saturno devorando a su hijo (Saturn Devouring His Son), a painting of Saturn, the god of melancholy, devouring his son whole. Borau translates this image into a tale of incest symbolizing the implosion of a dictatorial authority gorged on its own children.

The ants were whores. — Punch line of a joke about government censors that circulated in Madrid in the 1950s, in reference to The Naked Jungle, a 1954 film in which Charlton Heston fought Amazonian ants.

When Furtivos was first screened for the official Spanish censors they demanded thirty-five cuts. Borau refused and responded by initiating private screenings for critics, which landed him an invitation to the San Sebastián Film Festival. When its selection was challenged by government censors, the festival’s organizers responded by threatening to cancel the screening of all Spanish films unless Furtivos was included. The government backed down, and Furtivos won the festival’s Golden Shell award for best film and the Cantabrian Pearl for best Spanish-language film. The result of this success fueled the scandal of Furtivos as the only film ever released in Franco’s Spain without an exhibition license. The film is considered a tour de force and a turning point in Spanish cinema, as well being one of the top-grossing Spanish films of all time.

In the destructive element immerse! — Joseph Conrad

Beyond its sex scenes, the film’s most contentious image for the censors was the depiction of the civil governor, Don Santiago. This figure was intended as a caricature of Franco’s power, with all the arrogance, corruption, and bumbling that defined his last years writ large. The fact that Borau himself plays the part of the governor suggests both the director’s total immersion in his subject and his identification with the redemptive power of artistic liberty and vision at a pivotal moment of Spain’s historical transformation.

Dennis Adams